On our forth day in Oslo we decided to go to a botanical garden of Oslo. This was actually the only place that was a little bit too far to walk to.

We bought four round trip tram tickets at a gift shop inside the hotel.

We spent a good portion of the day exploring different parts of the garden. Kids ran around, climbed the hills, ran down the grass and on and on.

Also there was a nice Viking exhibition at one part of the park — a ship-like sculpture with a throne-like chair and a bunch of notes and little guides on how Vikings used to do certain things.

We decided to walk back to the hotel with a stop by Oslo Opera House building. I spoke with my dad earlier and he told me that one could walk up to the roof of the Opera House for some really nice views.

So our total walk back to the hotel was around two and a half miles. Not too bad at all.

So we did make it to the Opera House. And there actually was a real wide road really going around the building and ending up on the roof. And as expected there were great panoramic views from the top.

At this point we were getting kind of hungry, but in a typical European fashion majority of the food places were closed in the middle of the day. It took us a while before we found an open place called Celsius Cafe. Alёna went for some big bowl of Norwegian soup of some kind and kids and I had regular burgers. It was pretty decent.

When we got to the hotel we did some swimming at the pool. And then everyone was hungry again by dinner time. We went into a small bar across the street from the hotel and ordered some beers, burger and some French fries.

We always ask for hot sauce to go with the fries and this place had Sriracha. The combination turned out to be really great.

In fact we went there to repeat the same deal a couple of times more. During our first visit to this place we ran into a lonely Russian-speaking guy who was drinking beer by himself. We offered him to join our table. Turned out that he lives in Norway and does some construction work, but overall the conversation ended up being quite boring.

We started our fifth day with a visit to a History Museum that was yet again across the street from our hotel. The hotel had a really great location if you didn’t notice a pattern on your own yet. Anyhow — the tickets from the Viking Ship museum that I wrote about early also included admission to this museum.

Lots of Viking stuff inside. And a bunch of other exhibits. Definitely was worth a visit, especially for “free”.

After that we went to city hall again and actually explored it inside this time. A bunch of different stuff to see.

And then we went to Aker Brygge — which I wrote about earlier as well. We looked through a bunch of menus and settled on an Asian restaurant with some really good curry. Everyone enjoyed their lunch.

After the lunch we went onto the opposite side of the bay to explore Akershus Fortress — a really short walk. The fortress was quite big and we had a lot of ground to cover. We walked upon some pond that kids ended up playing at for a good while.

While they were playing Chinese tourists started photographing them and pushing them to pose for them.

I walked over and told them to stop. And they couldn’t care less — like I wasn’t even there. I started getting quite angry and that’s when they finally got a “hint”.

Our kids are very blond and I get that is’s a non-existent thing in China, but come on! On the same note — a lot of Norwegian kids are actually just as blonde. Even in Brooklyn this is kind of rare, in Norway — it is not.

We also visited Resistance Museum on the fortress grounds dedicated to Norwegian resistance of a Third Reich. Arosha knows a bit of history about WW2 so he found the museum quite interesting.

He is still a bit too little to fully grasp the horrors of that war, but I think he starts to understand it all more and we are trying to do our part of educating him.

When we got back to our hotel we decided to eat dinner at the same restaurant as we did on our first day — Den Glade Gris. This time we decided to try something more authentic. We ordered smoked whale and reindeer sausage.

Eating whale was really mentally hard. Especially whale being pretty much raw. We didn’t enjoy that in the least. Had no problems with the deer though.

On our final full day in Oslo we decided to go back to Bygdoy. There was a large open-sky Norwegian Folk Museum there that we didn’t go to during our first visit. What a good thing the decision to go back was. Probably one of the most interesting things to visit.

First of all it really is quite huge. It has whole wooden villages from different parts of Norway reconstructed. Most of the wooden homes you could actually walk into.

They also had a huge wooden Church that is a thousand years old — pretty much all the rest of such buildings burned down long ago.

At one of the houses they had girls dressed into traditional Norwegian closing backing bread on a stone stove on an open fire. The bread was quite tasty.

There were different live animals for kids to look at and pet. We also took a carriage ride along the park that our kids talked us into.

Also there were Sami exhibits and actual Sami representative visiting. Sami are the people that live on far north in Norway.

We talked to one of the natives and she told us a little bit about the history of Sami people and even sang us some songs in the native language.

We spent a whole day at that place. Really worth a visit, as I said. And after the museum we took a bus back to city hall via our unused tram tickets that we had left over from our botanical garden visit.

We went to Aker Brygge for a dinner again. This time we found a truly Norwegian place via TripAdvisor with very high ratings — Rorbua.

I had shish-kebab-like selection of meat — whale, deer, reindeer, beef and something else. Alёna had moose stew. And some great beer to go along.

Grilled whale meet tasted a lot like beef actually. But there is not going to be any more whale meat for me. I tried it, but I’m happy to live with my mental block of thinking that eating whale is just wrong — for me.

But overall this was probably my favorite restaurant that we ate at during our stay in Norway.

And that is it. The next day we went to airport via a special bus that runs right from our hotel and off to Iceland we went.

A couple of side notes: Alёna bought a ton of Norwegian hats, 1 USD was around 8 NOK, everything was quite expensive — Oslo is rated as one of the most expensive cities in the world — which seems true even after New York.

Kids were amazing — walking 5-6 miles daily turned out to not be a problem for them at all. And all in all this trip turned out to be pretty grate. Six days — plenty of things to do.